Echoes in the Content Space

In my childhood, I had a Marvel comic book role-playing game that I enjoyed immensely. It was not for its riveting  gameplay or complex storylines, because the truth is I  don’t ever recall playing the game.  Rather, it was the game’s supplementary book which had a exhaustive listing of  attributes applied to each Marvel superhero with an accompanying numerical ranking system from 0 to 100  based on each of these skills. It was great because I finally had a point of reference by which to compare and contrast the characters that I had been reading about for years. This led to an inner dialouge that went something like: “I knew it! The Thing is almost as strong as the Hulk! Whattaya mean Spiderman isn’t as smart as Doctor Strange?!” And so forth. It was fun for me to match up different characters (who might never have encountered each other otherwise) in different scenarios where they might apply their powers. Even more importantly, I now had quantifiable evidence should one of my friends attempt to engage me in any relevant argument regarding characters of the Marvel universe.  The individual graphs looked something like this:

Well, the Content Strategist might be viewed in much the same way. One, of course,  one need not have superpowers to have skills scored in similar fashion (for we all have moods, attributes etc. that could be fit into this sort of graphical representation) but certainly content strategists can be put into a correlating representative field to help us better understand the holistic nature of their work. Jeffrey MacIntyre has a very engaging article entitled Content-tious Strategy replete with a wonderful napkin diagram that provides an excellent and clear elicitation of four distinct disciplines from which the Content Strategist may be born.  Obviously, there are a number of interrelated fields and sub-fields that fall under (or next to) each of these categories, but I wanted to use the disciplines found on the napkin as a springboard to gain a larger picture of how these disparate communications disciplines may be distributed within three hypothetical Content Strategists. So then, applying the disciplines found on the napkin to the mold of our Spiderman graph it would look something like this. We will assume that a score of 90 and above is considered “expertise” in the field with 50 and above being “working knowledge”:

Mr. X has expertise in Information Architecture and is nearing expertise in Copywriting. He has a strong “working knowledge” of Content Analysis and has some, but limited knowledge of Editorial Strategy

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Ms. Y has an expertise in two fields: Copywriting and Editorial Strategy. She is nearing “working knowledge” in Information Architecture and has limited knowledge of Content Analysis.

Ms. Z is nearing expertise in three of the four disciplines and although she doesn’t have “expertise” in all of the fields as of this moment, you can obviously see that Ms.Z would still be quite a formidable Content Strategist.

In her excellent article The Case for Content Strategy-Motown Style, Margot Bloomstien says that to help define our value as Contents Strategists we should “cross sell complementary and necessary services such as design and content strategy.” I believe this is absolutely correct and in the context of the graphs above, we can see how the Content Strategist might fuse with these other “services”. But how can we as Content Strategists use these examples to further communicate our value? Well, I believe we need to be as explicit as possible in individually defining the disparate attributes that combine to create our whole.  Perhaps, today’s media professionals are so deeply immersed within their respective disciplines that they too often put the cart before the horse, glossing over basic explanations that could better communicate their current value to clients and end-users.  Considering the holistic nature of our work then, it is especially important for the Content Strategist to be mindful in this regard.  The rapid expansion of technologies and their inherent abstract terminology has left much “noise” in the system and many business managers are racing to catch up to speed. In the current climate, many businesses have no idea how to make sense of the new media models or even the nature of their needs to accomplish their full marketing or content objectives. Put simply: We cannot expect a potential client to understand the value of Content Strategy if they don’t understand the aspects that makeup content itself.  It is out of this confusion, however, that the Content Strategist CAN define their value, providing clarity not only on how each of the disparate components of content may function, but how these components integrate to help clients reach their their business’ marketing and communication goals. Do they know why they need information architecture? What type of copywriter would best suit their ideal, and how can great copy help them? How does visual design relate to content?  Helping to answer these fundamental questions and facilitating the understanding of the parts that add to the sum IS Content Strategy, and thus it must be elicited that Content Strategist is integral to the creation of meaningful human experience and in turn, a more efficient and productive future. Sounds like a superhero to me.

So, to help further understand the holistic nature of the Content Strategist, I will be writing a fourth and final part to this article where I will be applying some of the thoughts I have shared here in the context of Bruce Lee’s philosophy or “way”,  Jeet Kune Do.  Stay tuned…